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Winder Library System a Think of Wonder to Nordal, Norton Lecture--Scholar Describes Home University

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Sigurthur Nordal, professor of Icelandic literature at the University of Iceland, and fifth incumbent of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry, who has given to lectures of the Norton series at the Fogg Museum, finds the Widener Library one of the chief things that impresses him at Harvard, he made known to a CRIMSON interviewer.

Widener is so large and the workings we so much more complicated than anything in Professor Nordal's own country, that it is remarkable to him that this only a university library, and not one at some large city. Nordal hopes in the near future to travel to the New York City Public Library, an inspection tour to which he keenly look forward.

Professor Nordal is not like the English visitors to this country who just him and bear it and do without their usual afternoon tea while in America; he makes it himself in Iceland, and so does the same thing when in foreign countries.

When asked about the view prevalent in Iceland on the discovery of America by Leif Ericson about the year 1000. Professor Nordal said that there was no doubt about the fact that Leif Ericson did reach the North American Continent, and that the general concensus of opinion in Iceland seems to be that he got as far South as Massachusetts in the course of his wanderings.

In regard to the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Professor Nordal said that it has an enrollment of about 150. The majority of these students are inhabitants of Iceland, but there are a considerable number of foreigners who come to the island to study the language and the literature, and quite a number of the Icelandic students who make their homes in other parts of the island. As yet the University has no dormitories, but it intends to build some in the near future. Students who wish to study foreign languages have to go to Europe to study them, because the University is so small that they cannot afford to have teachers of languages which can be learned so easily on the Continent.

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